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Take 40% and raise capital for the VC operations as a separate transaction than from the LPs, of course.

Efficient markets.

Remember: if VCs believed in what they were doing they would not take a 2% annual management fee and 20% of the upside.

They’d take 40% of the upside and live on ramen noodles.

VCs make money by raising money from LPs.

They spend this money on investments which don’t look too bad if they fail, because nearly all of them fail. Looking good while losing all of your investors money on companies which go broke is the key VC skill.

Once in a while you get a huge hit. That’s a lottery win, there is no formula for finding that hit. Broad bets helps but that’s about it. The “VC thesis” is a fundraising tool, a pitch instrument, it makes no measurable difference to success. It’s a shtick.

Sympathy, however, for the VC: car dealership sized transactions paired with the diligence burdens of real finance. It’s a terrible job.

Once you understand that VC is one of the worst jobs in finance and they don’t believe most of their own story — it’s fundraising flimflam for their LPs - it’s a lot easier to negotiate.

1) we are a sound bet not to get you in trouble if we fail (good schools and track records)

2) we will work hard on things which your LPs and their lawyers understand, leaving evidence of a good effort on failure

3) we know how the game works and will play by the unwritten rules: keep up appearances

The kind of lunatics who actually stand to make money with a higher probability than average - the “Think Different” category - usually violate all of these rules.

1) they have no track record

2) they work on esoteric nonsense

3) they look weird in public

And they’re structurally uninvestable.

Once you get this it’s all a lot easier: the job of a VC is not to invest in winners, that’s a bonus.

The job of a VC is to look respectable while losing other people’s money at the roulette wheel, and taking a margin for doing so.

I hope that helps.

leashlesson Defending the city: An overview of defensive tactics

"speed and coordination"

Meth.

https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/

leashlesson Bird flu in Texas: many human cases, no certainty about human to human spread?

The article asks that question

leashlesson Bird flu in Texas: many human cases, no certainty about human to human spread?

The title summarizes the key facts of the article without adding editorial.

leashlesson Bird flu in Texas: many human cases, no certainty about human to human spread?

“But Russo and many other vets have heard anecdotes about workers who have pink eye and other symptoms—including fever, cough, and lethargy—and do not want to be tested or seen by doctors. James Lowe, a researcher who specializes in pig influenza viruses, says policies for monitoring exposed people vary greatly between states. “I believe there are probably lots of human cases,” he says, noting that most likely are asymptomatic.“

leashlesson Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

And remind me where that works again?

leashlesson Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

Lot cheaper than bank wires! Vastly faster too.

leashlesson Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

Think in terms of antimonopoly — VISA charges outrageous fees for decades because they’re the hub through which all payments go.

leashlesson Bartók's Monster – Stalking the dead composer through Transylvania (2013)

Yeah that was great :-) how unexpectly refreshing.

leashlesson Tom's Essay (2008)

I have always felt the MP3 format would have been better if they had used a really high entropy test track with a lot of distorted guitars and synth noises.

leashlesson Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

So the argument is twofold.

1) governments didn’t get to print money at will until they went off the gold standard, and the financial regime we have now is worse than the gold era. (Highly dubious, I don’t buy this entirely)

2) blockchain done right gives hub-and-spoke efficiency without creating hegemons like VISA, SWIFT and PayPal to boss around their users with impunity.

This I believe entirely.

leashlesson Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?

7. The blockchain is now at a stage in its development equivalent to where the internet was in or around 1995. The internet was unstoppable in 1995 and blockchain technology is unstoppable now. It will become ubiquitous in all major industrial and financial sectors, simply because it allows for the immutable recording of data, thereby reducing friction in commercial and consumer transactions and obliterating the scope for dispute as to what has occurred.

8. As the Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, I hold an office that pre-dates modern trade in derivatives and reinsurance, even steam engines, powered flight, and certainly the internet. I am particularly and obviously concerned about the reputation and development of English law and the jurisdiction of England and Wales. 9. Many people do not realise that English law governs trading in €600 trillion of OTC derivatives annually, in €11.6 trillion in metals trading, in £250 billion in M&A deals, and in £80 billion in insurance contracts every year – just to take a few examples. My hope is that English law will prove to be the law of choice for borderless blockchain technology as its take up grows exponentially in the months and years to come.

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Speech-M...

Case closed.

leashlesson Do artifacts have politics? [pdf]

A more recent work in the field:

https://kk.org/books/what-technology-wants

"By mapping the behavior of life, we paradoxically get a glimpse at where technology is headed-or “what it wants.” Kevin Kelly offers a dozen trajectories in the coming decades for this near-living system."

leashlesson When Armor Met Lips

Italian love of calamari.

leashlesson F-35 Program Achieves Full Rate Production

Most of the people who have died in this conflict are Russian soldiers aren't they?

leashlesson The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood

The nuclear family is a catastrophe all of its own. Most older cultures would consider two parents and two children in a house on their own far away from relatives a recipe for insanity in all parties, as it has been proven to be!

leashlesson F-35 Program Achieves Full Rate Production

The crux of it is that the weapons have improved very fast (range and energy density and targeting and rate of fire and other functionality all improving very fast) but protective systems like armour are not nearly keeping pace.

It's looking a bit like the struggle between armoured knights and guns. The place where the rubber really meets the road on this, the Big Problem, is surface navy: what's the lifespan of a floating metal castle in the age of hypersonic missiles?

Nobody wants to talk about that.

leashlesson F-35 Program Achieves Full Rate Production

Let us not forget: before this war, Russians went on holiday in Odesa. Ukrainians went on holiday in St. Petersburg.

It's not a genocidal war of annihilation. It's not WW2 redux. It's not Holodomor 2.0. I do not think everybody realises how low the stakes of this conflict really are.

leashlesson F-35 Program Achieves Full Rate Production

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/jet-fighter-costs-a-comple...

In 20 years they'll manufacture just one plane, and it'll cost a trillion dollars, if current trends continue to hold.

Also it'll the weight of an aircraft carrier.

leashlesson Ask HN: Which skills are least likely to be replaced by AI?

Came here to say this. And to add: we don't know to what degree human behaviour is regular.

It could be that in practice an AI can't really generalise well to All People compared to humans, because the humans are so diverse and the humans who are doing some jobs generalise to just the small set of people they are working with.

Right now it does look like prompts like "answer this as if you're one of Napoleon's generals" work fairly well, but I wonder if in practice we'll find out that specific human experiences which are hard to document will turn out to create niches which AI is very very poor at dealing with.

Potential examples:

* what does it feel like to fall in love? humans can't describe well.

* what does it feel like to summit Everest for the first time? ditto.

* what are spiritual experiences like?

Probably many other areas which are clearly important to people, particularly falling in love, but language is weak, and at the end of the day...

It's a large language model.

leashlesson Ask HN: Which skills are least likely to be replaced by AI?

English isn't an ideal language to describe what kinds of "charisma" an AI could have, but I don't think it's at all foolish or improbable to say than an AI system could have profound and indeed superhuman charisma.

Worshipping gods is an old human sport, and it wouldn't need *much* encouragement for humans to see an AI system as a sort of "village god" –– the kinds of entities which were worshipped all over the world before One Big God religions became common. A "Tesla Kami" which talks from your Tesla, and also talks for The Teslas, and also talks for Tesla, Inc. for example could be highly charismatic and not even slightly humanoid in appearance.

If you think I'm joking, consider the Knight Rider TV series with a talking car. Cars can have charisma even if they don't talk, but add a voice-and-mind and we're off to the races, so to speak.

Charisma is a funny thing.

leashlesson Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

I have heard it takes roughly ten years of practice of tai chi to be able to fight reasonably effectively using tai chi principles, assuming you have a very workable base of kung fu or something equivalent established (say ten years) before that.

If it's just about learning how to fight really really fast the WW2 combatives courses seem to be the best available system. I don't think any martial art is suited to the speed and directness of modern life.

leashlesson Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3Q6vqvemA this is pretty much what high level skills in Tai Chi look like. You can see that it's mainly very, very secure footwork and explosive coordinated force delivered when the opponent is off balance -- this is a grappling situation but the logic is pretty similar if they were hitting each-other or even using swords / spears.

leashlesson Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

Here is a pretty good example of a very large trained fighter and a very excellent and much smaller tai chi guy going at it reasonably hard (like maybe one of them walks away with a concussion type hard).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D5DGpORANE

I think that's a pretty good example of what "people who can actually fight well use tai chi techniques" looks like. A lot of force is going into those throws, bodies are flying, and they aren't students doing a demonstration for a crowd. Legit.

leashlesson Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

"Fighting" Tai Chi was traditionally taught to people who were already very adept at Kung Fu. If you can already fight the form trains a bunch of clever footwork and a few other things at a really high level; it's _clever_. But if you can't already fight it has none of that basic stuff in it like "how to hit people really hard". If you don't know that already Tai Chi forms won't teach it to you every effectively.

Younger kung fu people wouldn't generally be so into Tai Chi. You'd learn it as you aged so that as you became less athletic you'd be substituting smart for strong and extending your lifetime as an effective fighter. All of this context was lost when it came to the west.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Chengfu this is kinda what top tier tai chi people used to look like: neckless bears with fists the size of your head.

Also: weapons. In China open hand stuff is taught before you attempt the complexity of swinging round a sword but these were (and are) armed arts. Nobody shows up at a real fight without a machete or sabre I believe.

leashlesson Sam Altman Wants $7T

I don't think even SoftBank would go for that.

But... if... run multiple cities off the waste heat from the compute. Easy to see the chain of logic which runs from there to the Dyson sphere made of computronium.

We live in interesting times!

leashlesson Chinese researchers planning 1,600-core chips that use an entire wafer

Been hearing it for 30 years.

Finally?

leashlesson CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed (2012)

"Eventual consistency"

1) there is a network

2) on each block, a leader is selected to make the next block on the basis of a lottery -- each lottery ticket is a unit of computing done ("proof of work")

3) if the network splits, each subnet has a different leader and a different sequence of blocks from that point onwards

4) when the network comes back together, a new "agreed history" is formed from the last shared block, selecting the block with the most "work" done

and resulting in the transactions which were done and confirmed in the smaller subnet being thrown out and history rewritten as if they had never existed

This is the genius of Satoshi -- he figured out that something this trashy was good enough to get something done. Nobody in an academic setting would ever have considered that as a worthwhile solution I don't think.

It was madness. But it worked. It's the same kind of genius as Ethernet just rebroadcasting packets until something works rather than doing Token Ring type negotiation about who can talk next.

Worse really is better at times.

leashlesson CAP twelve years later: How the "rules" have changed (2012)

I remember about 2017 or 2018 giving a talk about Ethereum and asking how many people in the audience of maybe 400 had heard of the CAP theorem.

One hand went up in the back. That's when I knew our culture was doomed.

CAP is (for the record) why the blockchain is and is not "just a database" -- it's a database which takes a different position on CAP and as a result can be used for different things to other databases.